


Lit Crit

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Metafiction, Writer Lestrade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-22
Updated: 2014-12-30
Packaged: 2018-02-26 14:36:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2655605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lestrade as an OCD fic writer, writing fantasy relationships with Mycroft. Fluff, fun, a bit haunting.</p><p>In the Christmas lead-up I missed the pod-fic of this story that was posted by the ever-talented aranel_parmadil. It's good. You should go check it out!</p><p>http://archiveofourown.org/works/2790641/chapters/6263372?show_comments=true&view_full_work=false#comment_20905367</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Lestrade imagined them meeting over and over, in different ways than they had. That first meeting had, he felt, somehow failed them. It had come too soon, or too late. Before his divorce, after that doomed wedding. It had been too tangled with Sherlock and Sherlock’s needs and disabilities, interfering with any chance he and Mycroft might have had to get to know each other.

Mostly, he wrote their story over and over because he wished it would somehow come out right. So he wrote happy beginning after happy beginning for them.

He wrote the one where they met in youth—The six years between them were just right for imagining him playing big brother to Mycroft as Mycroft played to Sherlock. If he’d known them then, he thought, Mycroft might not have been so alone. They could have modeled “friendship” for Sherlock, giving him something other than the fraught codependency he and his brother had shared. He wrote about walks in the woods, trips to the city. He wrote about falling in love with his friend and being afraid to say it. He wrote about going to uni, studying criminal law, applying to the Met, forever ashamed and worried, forever seeing Mycroft as the younger boy he had to protect—until Mycroft arrived, a brilliant young man from Oxford, and they kissed in Lestrade’s little bedsit and stayed up twenty-four hours around, laughing and making love and going out for a late breakfast at a little café.

He wrote about them meeting as agents in the field, during Mcyroft’s brief time as a field agent. He wrote about them being assigned as partners, about finding they fit like a hand into a tailored glove. He wrote about facing down armed gunmen, and Mycroft being injured, and standing by the bedside and being deduced by Mycroft’s strange, perceptive little brother, who told him they loved each other and to stop being so damned boring and get on and do something about it. He wrote about their first kiss, in the cold white room with Mycroft stabbed with needles, and the heart machine pinging out their passion so it echoed off the plain enameled walls.

He wrote about how they met—it was at Lestrade’s retirement party. Forty years on the force, leaving as a seasoned DCI who only saw Sherlock Holmes a few times working with DI Dimmock, and who didn’t think much of the caustic prat. He wrote about a life in which he never worked for MI5, or was seconded to MI6 to serve as a liaison and surrogate brother for the strangest, shyest, most brilliant man of his age…a man who appeared at his retirement for professional reasons, and who watched him dance with Sally Donovan. Who followed Lestrade into the shadows outside the reception hall where he’d gone for a cigarette and to silently mourn the end of life as he knew it. They kissed for the first time there, in the shadows, and the last tendrils of smoke from the cigarette leaked from their lips when they drew away from each other, and Lestrade realized in that moment that when one life finished, another could begin.

He wrote about meeting in the morgue over Sherlock’s body, the corpse drug-wracked, emaciated, scarred and covered with sores, skin gone to hell from years of addiction. He wrote about watching a tall man, immaculately dressed, attempt to pretend he was not coming to pieces. He wrote about following him into the hallway and offering him a cigarette, and assuring him that sometimes, no matter how hard you tried or how much you loved, you couldn’t make it work out…and that it wasn’t always on you. Sherlock made his own choices, in the end. Then he took the tall man out for a sandwich, and twenty years later he died holding his partner’s hand, amazed at what Sherlock’s death had given him. In that one they kissed for the first time after the funeral, in the back seat of Mycroft’s limo, Mycroft clinging tight to Lestrade’s hand, the kiss seasoned with the salt-tang of the man’s first tears.

He wrote about meeting by the seaside at a little resort outside Marseilles after Lestrade’s divorce: a scruffy, tanned man ready to burn off melancholy encountering a trim man only a bit younger than he was, who’d come to deal with an unnamed agent of an unnamed nation. They flirted at a beachside taverna, the stranger staying out of the sun lest he burn, Lestrade soaking in the rays, his heart beginning to thaw for the first time in years. When the man learned he was a police officer, with experience seconded to MI5, he asked Lestrade to accompany him to Monte Carlo as improvised backup. He’d joined Mycroft gambling at the casino, bankrolled by MI6, wearing a tuxedo that made him feel like James Bond, and had joined in a fast car chase into the hills, before losing their prey when he leapt off a cliff and parachuted down to the city below. Their first kiss had been on that high, wind-swept edge, and Lestrade had felt like he was falling, falling, falling, with no parachute, his heart drumming inside his chest and his hands knit tight into the other man’s lapels.

He wrote about meeting at a coffee house in London, engaging in conversation and flirtation, and separating, never taking each other’s names…but remembering for long years after, and dying with the memory glowing like the vivid last spark of life before the darkness stripped them of everything. In that one they never kissed, but their single meeting burned in their minds with all the passion of every other story he wrote.

Lestrade wrote them during lunch hours, and late at night on his laptop, sitting at the kitchen table. He wrote them feeling stupid, and crazy, and more than a little obsessive. Story after story. Kiss after kiss. For years he kept them on a thumb drive he kept on his key chain, using every trick he knew to strip them from the memory on his hard drive. At some point, feeling mad and reckless but hungry for the certainty of backup, he uploaded them all to a cloud account he surrounded with all the security he could muster. He assured himself it was safe and private.

Then the day came when he reported for a meeting at Mycroft’s office, and found the other man bent over his laptop, reading. That wasn’t unusual—Mycroft’ seemed to be locked to a computer screen most of the time. Lestrade stood, waiting.

“I’ll be a bit longer,” Mycroft said. “You might want to sit.”

Lestrade shrugged, and settled in one of the iron chairs in front of Mycroft’s desk. He studied the beautiful, romantic portrait Annigoni had painted of the Queen. He’d written that portrait into so many stories: she seemed to symbolize so much about Mycroft. His sentimental hidden side, his equally hidden romanticism. A lush sensuality suggested by his beautiful suits, but buttoned down tight and never allowed to blossom. Duty. Honor. Sacrifice. Courage. Patriotism. It was all there. He could sit in this office, he thought, and look at that reproduction and the man beneath it, and feel like it told a story in its own right.

“You write very well,” Mycroft said, sounding uneasy. “These are very beautiful.”

Lestrade’s heart seemed to stop. He met the other man’s eyes. “What….?”

Mycroft shrugged, apologetically. “I was intending to refer you to a colleague, and did a standard background check to be sure you wouldn’t be embarrassed by anything she discovered doing her own.” He frowned, and added, “You probably want to take these down and back them up some other way. Cloud files are secure from most people. Not from all.”

Lestrade shivered. “I’ll do that, sir.”

“Let me know when you have and I’ll make that recommendation,” Mycroft said. “Did you bring your reports with you?”

Lestrade nodded, and handed over the thumb with the surveillance work he’d done in the past month. Mycroft took the drive and proceeded to review, asking questions as though nothing had changed. Lestrade’s heart settled and his adrenaline levels receded…but with every question and every discussion something seemed to die. It might almost have been better if Mycroft had been angry, he thought. Or hurt. Or offended. The calm of the man, the lack of any response but appreciation for the writing—it killed hope in a way nothing else could have.

Mycroft thought Lestrade wrote very well. That was all. There were thousands of words stored in that account. Hundreds of thousands of words---novels and novels worth. They were born together, lived together, died together. They celebrated and they mourned. They missed each other by seconds and never knew each other at all. Or Mycroft, through mad circumstance, was born into young Lestrade’s hands, in a lunatic coincidence involving unexpected early labor, a minor street accident with a cab, and a sidewalk delivery in a small blue-collar neighborhood of South London. They adopted children together, or lived without. Hundreds of possible lives—and Mycroft Holmes thought Lestrade wrote very well, and thought nothing more.

When their review was done, Lestrade rose, took back his thumb drive—cleansed of all data, which now resided on Mycroft’s computer. He picked up his overcoat, said his goodbyes, and prepared to leave. Only as he moved to the door, did Mycroft say, “Why do you never write about the present? You write about pasts that never happened, and futures that seem unlikely. Why do your stories never start in the here and now?”

Lestrade refused to turn around. He couldn’t face the man. Instead he looked down at the toes of his ugly, serviceable shoes on the fine wool carpet. “I suppose because pasts that never happened and futures that seem unlikely are the only times I can imagine us ever getting as far as a first kiss.”

The room was silent for a moment, and Lestrade felt the last thin thread of hope snap. He sighed regretfully. “I’ll let you know when I’ve pulled the stories, sir.”

Mycroft hummed a strangly ambiguous little hum of agreement—then said, “Wait…”

Lestrade did turn, frowning, then, and watched Mycroft rise up, stately as the Queen in the painting behind him—and to Lestrade, as romantic and elegant and haunting. He came around the desk and stood in front of Lestrade, a faint frown brooding between his eyebrows.

“You’re wrong, you know.”

“What?.... How?”

“The only time and place anyone can ever have a first kiss is in the present…and only by acting on the desire.”

Mycroft leaned forward, then, captured Lestrade’s lips, and proceeded to prove his point.

“Oh,” Lestrade said, when they parted. “Oh. Um…” He blushed, and risked grabbing Mycroft’s lapel. He glanced up at the other man. “You’re a pretty good writer, yourself,” he said. “Maybe we should collaborate.”

Mycroft smiled, and they went on from there. But that was another story….


	2. Oh, go listen!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aranel_Parmadil has done a pod-fic of this story! And as always, she did a GREAT job! Go see: 
> 
>  
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/2790641/chapters/6263372?show_comments=true&view_full_work=false#comment_20905367

Again, she did a good job!

http://archiveofourown.org/works/2790641/chapters/6263372?show_comments=true&view_full_work=false#comment_20905367


End file.
